History

Apparently Trump’s feelings were hurt after the North Koreans said mean things! The Washington Post: President Trump on Thursday canceled a planned summit next month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, citing “tremendous anger and open hostility” from the rogue nation in a letter explaining his abrupt decision. “I feel it is inappropriate, at […]

Our panopticon is on track: Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon. Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance. […]

I was cleaning leaves out of the flower beds at the new house when I heard the news and hoped that #1 child was in class today in Framingham and not taking the day off to watch a race in person. She hasn’t texted me back yet. She’s probably just busy.

It’s taken 12 years for terrorism to go after soft targets here in the US. I expect there will be another round of shrieking about how we must go after brown skinned people and clamp down even more and subject each other to even more interrogation and frisking. But there are more than 300 million of us and we will all grind to a halt, some of us cowering under our beds, and the country will be no safer from soft target terrorism.

Maybe this time, we’ll think before we invade, although I’m sure the military contractors would prefer we are thoroughly freaked out by today’s turn of events.

Yes, I’m pissed off and I’m very sad for the victims. But I haven’t lost my mind yet. This time, we need to keep our collective heads cool because as far as we know, the soft target terrorism is just beginning and we don’t know yet who is responsible.

Schools are closed today in MA. Most colleges, too, public and private. It’s a state holiday. You have my sympathies. My son and his wife were there today. They’re OK. Pretty shaken up. They were unable to call for awhile because the police banned cell phones because they didn’t know what detonated the bombs. Not a time that “no news is good news”. But unless your daughter is a real marathon enthusiast (my son runs the race), she probably didn’t wander into the city. The race route goes right through Framingham so she could have seen it from there.

Good to know. Maybe they’re investigating the whole route which is why I can’t seem to reach her. Or maybe she’s just being insensitive. She *did* call me when she was evacuated from Lahaina because of the Tsumani warning so you’d think she’d check in.

My parents were totally disinterested in my activities and it would never occur to them to wonder about family members at risk in a disaster area. So, I used to be really sloppy about checking in with roommates and friends.

But that changed when I came back from visiting family at home and found my roommate in a complete meltdown because I had left without any notice to her.

It turned out that when she was 12-ish her dad and brother had gone canoeing (without letting the rest of the family know) and they never came back. Their canoe flipped and they drowned and (because of the spontaneity & lack of communication) it took WAY too long for the family to figure out what had happened.

Communication doesn’t have to mean you (we) are making a big deal about something. It just means we’re staying in touch. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.

Wouldn’t surprise me. Today is Patriot’s day in MA and the approximately the anniversary of the start of the American Revolution. “Listen my children and you will hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the 18th of April in 75, hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.”

Tax-protester Andrew Kehoe added several new features to domestic terrorism. He had an initial distracting event to draw emergency responders away from the scene of the main attack. He added the car bomb. And he added the suicide bombing.

With a reputation for thriftiness, Kehoe was elected treasurer of the Bath Consolidated School board in 1924. While on the board, Kehoe fought endlessly for lower taxes. He blamed the previous property tax levy for his family’s poor financial condition

Up until the Oklahoma City bombing, Bath, Michigan, was the single deadliest act of domestic terrorism/mass murder in US history.
On May 18, 1927, 45 people, mostly children, were killed and 58 were injured when disgruntled and demented school board member Andrew Kehoe dynamited the new school building in Bath, Michigan.

Full text, with photos, of the book on the Bath School Disaster by M. J. Ellsworth.

When I heard the news a laundry list of suspects went thru my head. From North Korea to Islamic radicals to Irish dissidents and finally since it’s Patriot’s Day, some home grown militia upset because Obama looked a their guns funny.

Forgot to add, a member of one of those wedding parties Obama blew up with his drones.

Struggling with Links, Blockquotes, images or videos?

Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

The Hill, "Court orders Iran to pay billions to 9/11 victims and families: A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Iran to pay billions of dollars in damages to the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks." It's unlikely they will actually pay it, but the very idea that Iran should have to pay for an attack by Saudi Arabians is pr […]